


a king caught in the thicket

by Chestnut_filly



Series: Actual Fic [12]
Category: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Canon Jewish Character, Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, F/M, Female Jewish Character, Fic, Fluff, Hair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-13 07:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13565661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly
Summary: Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; / Thine eyes are as doves behind thy veil; / Thy hair is as a flock of goats, that trail down from mount Gilead.





	a king caught in the thicket

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/gifts).



> A very happy last day of Purimgifts to you, Kass! Thank you once more for your lovely prompt, and chag sameach.
> 
> \--
> 
> The bit of the Shir that makes up the summary is from my old, old copy of the JPS 1917 Tanakh: old enough that it's vaguely possible that Mary might actually have owned that translation! 
> 
> The line that makes the title is lightly adapted from Ariel and Chana (z'l) Bloch's incredibly beautiful 1995 translation, 7:6, pg. 101: "Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel, the hair of your head like royal purple. A king is caught in the thicket."
> 
> The background to the image is a detail from one of Lee Price's wonderful bathtub paintings.

✡ - ✡ - ✡

As I believe I have mentioned previously, my husband has a particular proclivity for my hair. Beyond his liking, he has an astonishing facility for the dressing of it that would seem more in keeping with a French lady’s maid of the Belle Epoque than the once-and-still-renowned detective Sherlock Holmes. Nevertheless, it seems to me a healthy outlet that marries his fine attention to detail and clever violinist’s fingers with the sort of tenderness that shines through in only a few brilliant moments in my Uncle John’s narratives, and more frequently than I had once expected in our farmhouse chambers in the evening. 

February is the worst month for weather on the Downs. It does not rain: it ices, sleets, and hails without ever once letting fall a respectable snowflake or drop of rainwater. At the moment which I am presently relating, it felt as though all the sodden downpours the Downs were missing had collected in my hair and all the ice that had half-heartedly melted away had taken up new residence in my ears, nose, and extremities. Infected with a species of cabin fever, I had decided to take a tromp across the partially deliquesced hills during a moment of, if not clarity, at least lesser fury amid the storm. It had, much to my chagrin, been a miscalculation. 

“Why, Russell, this will not do at all,” Holmes chided from the door to the coatroom, where I stood dripping in rather the attitude of an affronted cat. 

I bit back the urge to hiss like a proper cat. Already I had struggled out of my (useless) galoshes and mac, but removing my hat from my poor, drenched, tangled mass of hair was proving even more difficult. Holmes standing there in his robe and slippers looking as warm as Jerusalem in summer was nearly as bad as another gust of sleet down my neck. 

“If all you are disposed to do is chide me from the doorway, Holmes, you might as well leave me to it,” I groused, yanking ineffectually at a strand of hair that had somehow inserted itself _into_ the band of the hat. 

Holmes quirked his narrow lips in one of his multi-purpose smiles, this one warmed rather by the crinkling of his eyes as he took the few steps necessary to cross the small room to me. 

“No, this will not do in the slightest,” he repeated. “Allow me.” 

I felt a moment’s urge to send him out of the room despite his attempt at mollification, but gave in. I was very cold and very wet, and the hat was the only thing keeping me from the warmth of the well-stoked fire I could just about sense from the main room. I dropped my arms in lieu of response and stood quietly as Holmes deftly unhooked my hair from whatever krakenish arrangement it had found in collusion with the hat. 

“There,” he said, and hung the hat on its accustomed hook, one or two long, blonde hairs still straggling from the rim. “Come along, now, Russell.” 

He took my by the hand, an unwonted display of affection for him, and led me into the blessed warmth of the living room. I turned myself to the large chairs before the fire, but Holmes kept tugging me away from the hearth and towards the stairs, which in their gloom looked cold and forbidding. Certainly I made some inchoate noise of protest, since Holmes turned to me with a smile still crooked in the corners of his lips and said, “I drew a bath for my own purposes while you were out, thinking to sit in it and smoke and contemplate some problems of structure that have arisen in my latest monograph, but I do believe you could use it rather more than I.”

The prospect of a hot bath, perhaps scented with the salts Mrs. Hudson liked to allow herself on particularly trying days, went a long way towards making up for the increasingly distant fire. 

“That sounds lovely,” I said, and shifted so Holmes no longer gripped my wrist and rather held my hand as we ascended the stairs to the bathroom.

As promised, the large claw-footed tub that Holmes insisted on (perhaps out of nostalgia for the Victorian plumbing of his Baker Street days) was full and steaming behind its screen in the little green-tiled bathroom that adjoined our rooms. Holmes’ pipe rested on a folded towel on the small bath-side stool—I wrinkled my nose at the thought of tobacco on the linens but held my tongue, as Holmes had dropped my hand and gone bustling to the linen cabinet to draw out some of Mrs. Hudson’s bath salts. 

“Go on, undress and get in the tub,” he said, apparently engrossed in deciding between gardenia and lavender. 

“My hair,” I protested, thinking of it all tangling even worse in the water and the battle it would be to work a brush through it. 

“I’ll manage it, Russell. As it stands, your fingers are frozen enough to do more harm than good if you were to try to brush out your hair.” 

I snorted but conceded the point as I discovered the buttons of my blouse rather harder to undo than usual. Holmes puttered about the bathroom collecting various mysterious sundries while I disrobed as fast as my still-numb fingers would allow. 

Slipping into the bath felt like absolute bliss for an entire second before my icy hands and feet protested their too-fast submersion in too-hot water. I gritted my teeth and ducked my head under the water, feeling it cool noticeably around my shoulders as the last of the sleet fanned out into the bath. I surfaced, the throbbing in my extremities dimming down to the pleasant lassitude of a truly needed bath. Across the room, Holmes hummed quietly, and I rested my head against the lip of the tub and simply marveled at the miracle of hot water. 

A gentle hand on the crown of my head startled me out of my reverie. “Lean forward,” Holmes murmured, and slipped a folded hand towel behind my neck. “And back again. There, yes, thank you.” 

Holmes had evidently brought the stool around behind me, the pipe banished to parts unknown. My hair hung over the lip of the tub, doubtless dripping terribly, but I hardly had time to protest before Holmes gathered it up in a loose twist. One of the items he had gathered in his peregrinations about the room had been my wide-toothed wooden comb, with which he set about separating the tangled ends of my hair. 

I was given to impatient yanking in my own morning and evening ablutions, the patience needed for gentleness sorely lacking as sleep receded or approached, but Holmes stroked the comb steadily through my hair as if he had no other task in the world other than teasing out its knots. Not a hair pulled as he worked his way from the tips of my hair to the roots, his strokes growing longer as he teased out the snarls. He was humming again, something delicate that I couldn’t place. 

There came a pause in the proceedings and the sound of a bottle uncorking, then the sensation of my hair being gathered and stroked as one bunch, the scent of rosemary from the oil I used to clean and soften it. The ends tended to, Holmes worked the oil gently through the rest of my hair and began to massage his fingertips against my scalp. The sensation was one of enormous relief, though from what I could not say. His nails scratched faintly behind my ears, the pads of his fingers stroked lightly down from my part in a steady, lulling rhythm. A drop of oil and condensation escaped my hair and ran down my forehead; Holmes stroked softly across my temples to brush it away. All the while he hummed, a steady rise-fall of sound just at the edge of hearing. 

The tune finally caught— a late verse of the Song of Songs set to music by a creatively minded colleague of mine at Oxford that had been wending persistently through my head since he had played it for me. 

_Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; Thine eyes are as doves behind thy veil; Thy hair is as a flock of goats, that trail down from mount Gilead._

My mouth tugged into a smile. Trust Holmes, who espoused a vague bewilderment at my studies, to not only remember the little melody but to translate it for himself and bring it out at an opportune moment. I gave a sort of backwards nuzzle to the hand running through my hair, hummed softly along with the last few words. 

Holmes chuckled softly, gathered the last stray strands of hair out of the bathwater, sprinkled in a handful of bath salts—he had chosen lavender—and made as if to braid it. 

“I’ll only go to sleep on it, Holmes,” I protested, voice hardly above a murmur. 

“You certainly won’t have time to dry it before bed,” he responded. “This way it won’t tangle in the night or wet the pillows so much.” 

“You’ve already-"

“Russ, please.” Holmes’ voice was soft and quite low, a register I rarely heard outside the dark of our bedroom quite late or early. “Let me.” 

How could I refuse? I reached over my shoulder and found his hand hear the nape of my neck, squeezing it gently. “Very well, then,” I said. “Thank you, Holmes.” 

Holmes did not respond as such, but laid one of his long, clever hands on the join of my neck and shoulder, pressing for just a moment, skin cool against my bath-flushed throat. He then resumed his ministrations, dividing my hair into three, and began the long process of braiding it. 

Lulled once more by the gentleness of his touch, the heat of the bath, and the faint scent of lavender, I let my eyes slide closed and drifted. Holmes, I knew, would finish my hair and retire to our bed with a monograph or a book as he did these rainy evenings, and in the meantime I could sleep quite safely until the bath went cold and it was time for me to join him. 

For all its irritations, the tapping of the rain on the windowpane mingled beautifully with Holmes’ soft humming as he picked up the tune again.

 


End file.
